With VSTO 2005, you can build doc-level custom task panes (although we called them ActionsPanes). Our doc-level task panes were built on the old ISmartDocument technology – effectively, VSTO offered a streamlined RAD mechanism for building smart doc solutions...

The industry is waking up to something the cool kids have known for a long time: you can build serious applications using Office as a base platform and Visual Studio as your toolset and runtime engine.
One consequence is that our team is rapidly...

In my previous posts on shimming Excel automation add-in UDFs, I've used simple examples where the methods tended to take and return standard types such as doubles and ints. Someone asked a question recently - what about Excel types as parameters? In...